Law enforcement and other agencies use a variety of sensors to detect hazardous materials such as radioactive/nuclear materials, chemicals, biohazards and explosives. Training and testing personnel and equipment with actual hazardous material presents problems. For example, radioactive sources that are dangerous enough to realistically portray a potential terrorist or environmental hazard will also be potentially hazardous to trainees, and may present a safety risk to the public. It may also be difficult, for reasons of cost, security, regulations, etc., to maintain an actual inventory of all potentially threatening sources merely for training purposes.
Simulated sources solve many such problems. A simulated source injected into a detection system can be made indistinguishable from a real source, from the point of view of sensor nodes and trainees, providing realistic training and systems testing. A simulated source has no associated radioactive or other hazards since there is no actual source involved. And the only practical limit on the diversity of simulated training scenarios is the imagination of the programmer responsible for the simulation. Unusual or unexpected situations are just as easy to simulate as run-of-the-mill hazards and do not require stockpiling of exotic materials.
Simulated sources can be used both to train users and also to test the system.